Romney Foreign Policy Team Members Ignored CIA 9/11 Warnings During Bush Administration

Originally posted September 11, 2012. Re-posted in the context of foreign policy noise from the Romney campaign.

Vanity Fair contributing editor and former NY Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald writes in an op-ed piece in the September 11Times that the CIA warned Bush of an al Qaeda attack on US soil as early as May 1, 2001, and that the warning escalated to "imminent" by June 22. Despite the warnings,

... [N]eoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials ... protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

Today, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11/2001, it's worth noting that 17 of 24 Romney foreign policy advisers served in the Bush Cheney administration.

These include including John Bolton, Michael Hayden, Dan Senor, Eric Edelman, and Eliot Cohen.